Last year, Anna Pawliw travelled to
Abitibi to visit the site of what was once the Spirit Lake Internment
Camp.Pawliw's mother - a toddler at the
time - and grandparents were imprisoned there for nearly two years
during the First World War. Their only crime was that, as immigrants
from western Ukraine, they held Austro-Hungarian passports.

"I spent the night at Spirit Lake.
Because it's so far north, there was already snow. At 5 in the morning,
I heard the train coming, and I could imagine what it was like for
them. They were so far away from their home in Montreal - they must
have wondered how this thing would end and what it was all for," said
Pawliw, 62, a Pierrefonds resident.

Between 1914 and 1918, 8,579 immigrants
to Canada were held in 24 internment camps across the country. Though
it's estimated 3,000 were genuine prisoners of war, the rest were
civilians, hard-working immigrants, many of them Ukrainians like the
Pawliws, who had been recruited to work in Canada.

"The internees were sent to remote
locations and forced to work for the profit of their jailers," said
Lubomyr Luciuk, a professor at Royal Military College in Kingston,
Ont., and acting chairperson of the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties
Association.

There were 1,300 prisoners at Spirit
Lake. It was one of only two Canadian internment camps where women and
children were also held captive.

Prisoners lived in overcrowded barracks
and were forced to do slave labour. Their guards were under orders to
shoot anyone who tried to escape.

Tomorrow, members of Montreal's
Ukrainian community will gather at the downtown YMCA on Stanley St. to
unveil a plaque recognizing the kindness shown to their ancestors by
the YMCA.

Anne Sadelain, who lives in Edmonton
and co-founded the Descendants of Ukrainian Canadian Internee Victims
Association, came up with the idea for the plaque.

Her father was a survivor of four
internment camps. When Sadelain was sorting through his old papers, she
noticed many were written on YMCA stationery.

"I believe the YMCA was one of the only
associations that ever tried to help the Ukrainian and other EastEuropean internees," she said.During the First World War, the YMCA
helped prisoners of war overseas and in Canada."On the domestic front,YMCA teams visited internment camps across
Canada and provided educational and moral support to internees," Luciuk
said.

Sadelain's father rarely spoke about
his experience in the camps. "He never wrote to tell his mother he was
in prison. He didn't think she'd understand he'd been imprisoned for no
reason," she said.

Sadelain contacted Luciuk, whose group
has been installing commemorative plaques across Canada to mark the
sites of former internment camps.

Representatives of two Ukrainian
churches in Montreal will be at the local unveiling, including Ihor
Oshchipko, the priest at St. Michael's Ukrainian Catholic Church on
d'Iberville St.

"Sixty families from St. Michael's were
interned at Spirit Lake," said Yurij Luhovy, a Montreal-based
documentary film director who was the last person to film the
internment camp before it was dismantled in the 1970s.

"A lot of these families didn't know
why they were interned, nor when they would be released. Nobody
answered their questions," Luhovy said.

Following the ceremony, children's
author Marsha Skrypuch will launch her latest book, Prisoners in the
Promised Land: The Ukrainian Internment Diary of Anya Soloniuk,
published by Scholastic.

Skrypuch spent five years researching
her novel, most of which is set at Spirit Lake. Anya Soloniuk is a
fictional character, but she is based on real girls who were imprisoned
at Spirit Lake, including Stephanie Mielniczuk Pawliw - Anna Pawliw's
mother.

"I like to find little flakes of
history that have been shoved under the carpet," Skrypuch said.Kim Pawliw, Anna Pawliw's 15-year-old
niece and Stephanie Mielniczuk Pawliw's granddaughter, hopes to come
from Sherbrooke to attend the ceremony. Although Stephanie Mielniczuk
Pawliw died in 2003, she continues to inspire her granddaughter.

"She always looked on the bright side
and she used to make me perogies," Kim said."She and her family lost everything they
had when they were sent to Spirit Lake."They weren't enemies. They were
forgotten by history and by the government. But I don't want their
experience to be forgotten. It wasn't their fault."

The unveiling of the commemorative
plaque will take place at 11 a.m. tomorrow at the YMCA, 1440 Stanley
St. The unveiling will be followed by the launch of Marsha Skrypuch's
book Prisoners in the Promised Land: The Ukrainian Internment Diary of
Anya Soloniuk. Proceeds from the sale of the book will be donated to
the Ukrainian Canadian Professional and Business Association of
Montreal.